Tsunami readiness in Oregon struggles to take shape

View full sizeRandy L. Rasmussen/The OregonianThe Pegrin II, beached by waves triggered by the earthquake off Japan, last Friday near Brookings.

It's near impossible in the heartache of Japan's tragedy to think of how much worse things could be. But the island nation, whose death toll rises well into five digits, is the most earthquake-ready place on earth and withstood a tsunami probably as well as could be.

We are not remotely able to make the same claim for ourselves.

Yet the Northwest coast faces a geologic situation beneath its offshore waters quite like that which rampaged upon Japan last week. And it is a geologic underlay with a busy history: Massive quakes have blasted Oregon's coast nearly 20 times in the last 10,000 years -- the last of them just 311 years ago.

No one knows when the next one will be except to say there will be a next one. Meanwhile we can only judge how prepared we are, and we're not.

Our warning system is built to provide adequate notice of distant events and anticipated tsunamis such as Japan's -- but not for those occuring close-in, originating along the Cascadia subduction zone, for which folks in Cannon Beach or Bandon would have about 15 minutes to find high ground.

For close-in ruptures and tsunamis, our first real warning is the shaking ground beneath feet or rattling bed posts. None of the other measures -- sirens, reverse 9-1-1 phone calls, police and firefighters -- would signal a tsunami in time.

That's the big difference in Oregon's experience last week as waves arrived hours after the quake let go off Japan and snapped a whip of energy through the sea to our shores. Despite wrecking ball damage to the Port of Brookings Harbor and notable harm to Depoe Bay, we did pretty well.

Low-lying communities, populous Seaside among them, followed warnings and evacuated. Fire departments wisely figured the elderly would have a hard time scrambling to safety, and so residents of a senior facility situated in Newport's tsunami inundation zone were relocated to nearby Oregon Coast Community College.

But even though our reaction time was measured by hours and our potential shoreline hit would be miniscule compared to Japan's, not everything worked. Some coastal residents failed to hear public address systems. Reverse 9-1-1 dialing was slow: In Lincoln County, autodialers started waking residents at 2:30 a.m. but were still making calls at 7:30 a.m., with just 60 percent to 70 percent completion. Oregonians with cell phones do not receive 9-1-1 calls unless they go to a website and sign up, a not widely understood fact that has prompted a surge of sign-ups since.

Yet the most important work of all -- tsunami inundation zone mapping of our coast -- is far from complete. It allows civil defense officials in shoreline towns and cities to devise efficient tsunami evacuation routes for all who would be affected.

The Oregon Department of Geology and Mineral Industries, whose funding from the state has declined in the last five years, offers 10 mapped areas of low-lying coastal communities based on pre-2006 information -- a good guide for the time being. But the department, under a grant from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, now uses modeling techniques that vastly expand and detail our maps to show where 80 to 100 feet of water would truly reach if it slammed into our coast.

That information is gold if Oregonians are to have a best shot at escaping. The new mapping will cover every inch of Oregon's coast but is just 25 percent complete: from California north to Coos Bay. Its timely completion is essential to help arm not only coastal residents but the thousands of Oregonians who in summer months fill 70 state parks situated along the coast.

But no map replaces judgment. That's the part we can learn from most in this terrible moment for Japan. If we are ever to suffer a tsunami, we must reckon with the tools available to us. That means knowing what the sirens and 9-1-1 calls can and cannot do -- and what every Oregonian can do for him or herself.

It starts with knowing the most valuable warning is moving ground and making the decision to escape via a known route out of a mapped inundation zone.